The next phase of BitTorrent's amazing transformation from the service whose name legislators made, by accident or design, synonymous with copyright infringement to the engine for a legitimately sanctioned commercial industry, began today.

Brightcove, which provides Internet streaming services to commercial broadcasters including CBS, Fox, and Discovery Communications, will incorporate the P2P streaming technology as "BitTorrent DNA" into its new IP video delivery platform, which it promises will bring broadcast-quality video to Flash-enabled players as soon as next year.

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AT&T has signed a deal with Aloha Partners to buy 12 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz frequency for $2.5 billion, which will enable the company to expand its wireless services across the United States. Broadband Internet coverage and broadcasting digital TV over the air are possible uses for AT&T.

Interest in the 700 MHz spectrum has soared recently due to an upcoming FCC auction in which the government will raise at least $10 billion. The auction is slated to begin January 8, 2008 and will include the likes of Verizon and Google. Many see the release of the spectrum as a way to boost competition in the wireless broadband Internet space.

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Following through with a partnership first announced last January, RealNetworks and MTV said Tuesday that their Rhapsody music service will soon be available through TiVo set-top boxes. TiVo subscribers will be able to browse and stream songs and movies on demand from Rhapsody.

The deal is part of a broader initiative by Real to expand Rhapsody's presence in the media industry in hopes of gaining some ground on market leader Apple's iTunes. The company recently sold a stake in Rhapsody to MTV, creating a new joint venture. Real previously also forged partnerships with Nokia and Reingcom, the maker of iRiver music players.

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Early this afternoon, the developers of an all-purpose, presence-providing application for instant messaging, IRC, and other communications services announced it has been acquired by Google.

Jaiku, a messaging application that lets communicators know who's available, what they're up to, and whether they'd really like to speak with you, will soon be part of Google's services, though the company today admitted it wasn't quite sure how it would bring that about.

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In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, Novell public relations director Bruce Lowry said there may be more for a Utah court to determine than just the $800,000 in SVRX software licensing royalties that both sides agree SCO owes Novell, as part of their original asset purchase agreement.

"There is still a dispute over the SCOsource licenses SCO issues to Microsoft and Sun in 2003," Lowry told us, "which totaled some $26 million between them. The District Court judge [Dale Kimball] ruled earlier that a portion of that money belongs to Novell. What exactly that amount was something the District Court was going to consider in the trial that got postponed due to SCO's bankruptcy filing."

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Wal-Mart's presence in rural American life continues to grow. Today, the company announced it will begin selling HughesNet Broadband service at 2,800 stores across the nation, with a notable presence in rural areas where terrestrial broadband services are still largely unavailable.

HughesNet is a satellite-based Internet service, formerly known as DirecWAY, which relies on "a clear view of the southern sky" to deliver broadband speeds.

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In anticipation for the holiday season, Microsoft plans to release version 1.2 of Games for Windows Live next month. The program enables PC-based games to tap into Xbox Live, and a number of titles including Halo 2 and Shadowrun fall under the brand.

The 1.2 update will bring a number of bug fixes, along with user interface improvements, support for offline Achievements, and the ability to see if you can join your friends in a game. According to Microsoft blogger Brandon LeBlanc, the Redmond company can update the Games for Windows Live elements just as it does the Xbox 360 Dashboard.

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Confirming a statement made by Petko D. Petkov on his GNUcitizen.org blog over two weeks ago, almost in passing, Adobe has released a security advisory warning of a potential exploitable flaw in its Acrobat and Adobe Reader software. While Petkov has never made the exploit itself public, Adobe's suggested system registry fix suggests a maliciously crafted PDF can be made to send e-mail undetected.

Instructions posted to Adobe's security site tell Acrobat and Adobe Reader users where they should edit a particular entry in the Windows System Registry. That entry contains a list of protocol identifier stubs that PDF files may typically find embedded. There, users will find a long string terminated by zero (REG_SZ), which lists several URI stubs followed by digits evidently denoting how the PDF handler should process them.

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Sony on Tuesday announced its second-generation Blu-ray disc burner for computers, which doubles the speed of its predecessor to 4X. The BWU-200S can record a full 50GB disc in 45 minutes, and also improves upon standard DVD+R burning speed, which is now at 16X.

Like early-generation CD and DVD burners, however, Sony's new model won't come cheap. The BWU-200S carries a price tag of $600, which includes CyberLink's Blu-ray burning software, and 50GB BD-R discs run upwards of $30 a piece for 2X versions. The drive features a Serial ATA interface and works with Windows Vista and XP.

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While Sony has no plans to bring the 40GB PlayStation 3 to the United States, the model is making its way from Europe to Japan. The company said the mid-range model, which unlike its brethren lacks support for PS2 games, will go on sale November 11 for 39,980 yen ($342).

In the process, Sony will drop the price of its 20GB PS3 by 10 percent as of October 17, bringing the cost down to 44,980 yen ($384). The 60GB model will also become cheaper, selling for 54,980 yen ($470). Sony is phasing out the 60GB PS3 as part of the price drops, which are being made in preparation for the holiday season. The high cost of the PlayStation 3 has hindered its ability to compete with the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360.

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Confirming speculation published in this morning's New York Times, the Sprint executive largely responsible for guiding his company through the merger with Nextel has been ousted this afternoon by Sprint's Board of Directors. Gary Forsee is out as chairman and chief executive officer, and an upheaval of the board is necessary to keep Sprint going in his absence.

The explanation for Forsee's ouster speaks for itself: Sprint admitted after the close of business this afternoon that it is adjusting its guidance for fiscal year 2007 lower than its previous estimate, and that it lost approximately 337,000 post-paid subscribers in just the third fiscal quarter alone.

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On the recommendation of the US Director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week declined to open an investigation into evidence that the National Security Agency may have received more information from US telecommunications carriers than it actually requested, in conjunction with federal terrorism investigations, and that it may have investigated innocent civilians as a result.

"The Director of National Intelligence concluded that the United States '[has] consistently asserted the military and state secrets privilege in litigation concerning allegations of an alleged NSA records program,"' cites FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's quote of Director J. M. McConnell, "because disclosures regarding such intelligence activities could cause 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security."'

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The president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters is urging Congress to open an inquiry into the long-standing relationship between recording artists and their record labels. David Rehr's objective is to determine whether the reason artists claim they've been treated unfairly over the past several decades is not because terrestrial doesn't pay them, but because someone else doesn't.

Last July 31, in one of the more extraordinary exchanges to take place in a US House of Representatives conference room in recent memory, a single spokesperson for the broadcasting industry found himself debating giants of American music. There, ICBC Broadcast Holding's Charles A. Warfield, Jr., told the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property that radio was largely responsible for the popularity of most American recording artists since the 1920s -- a fact that, for a time, was actually in dispute -- and that radio broadcasters should not have to pay the recording industry for the right to popularize its artists.

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Even though Take-Two attempted to tone down the violence in its Manhunt 2 video game, the revised version is still too much for British eyes.

The British Board of Film Classification said Monday that the changes made were not enough for it to lift the ban of the game within the UK. The US, which also banned the original version, has allowed the revised one to ship within the US.

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With the PlayStation 3 not generating the revenue Sony expected, it now appears that the company is looking at in-game advertising to turn its gaming division around. The new division will be headed by Darlene Kindler, a two-and-a-half decade veteran of the consumer electronics industry. She will assume the title of network advertising director, and report to Sales and Business Development chief Phil Rosenberg.

Kindler will be tasked with developing an in-game advertising strategy for all of Sony's PlayStation platforms, as well as advertising within the PlayStation Network. She had most recently worked with Adscape Media, an in-game advertising company that was acquired by Google in March, and previous to that had worked at Nintendo as part of the company's start-up team. Sony did not say when the advertising would begin to appear in its games.

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